Fewer college students indicate they are nonbinary amid backlash

Nonbinary students may be wary of being ‘out’ on their college applications. Vladimir Vladimirov via Getty Images by Genny Beemyn, UMass Amherst The national backlash against trans and nonbinary young people may have led fewer nonbinary students to disclose their gender identity in their applications to college for this fall. That is according to my analysis of how students who applied to college through the Common App identified their gender. The Common App is a good barometer because more than 1 million students use it annually to apply to more than 1,000 U.S. schools. For the most recent admissions cycle, 1.88% of students, or 23,620 individuals, chose a nonbinary gender term to describe themselves, down from 2.2%, or 25,959 individuals, in the last cycle. That may not seem like a large drop, but it is a huge change from the past few years, when the number of students indicating that they were nonbinary had skyrocketed. For example, on one of the largest surveys of college students, the American College Health Association’s National College Health Assessment, the percent of students identifying as nonbinary more than doubled from 2020 to 2022, going from 2.5% to 5.1%. Then, in spring 2023, the rate...